Kevin R. Budner

Budner played a leading role for Lieff Cabraser in one of this century’s largest high-profile tort class actions, and he is doing the same now in an even bigger one.

The first was the Volkswagen clean-diesel multi-district litigation. Though still a relatively junior lawyer, Budner was on his firm’s leadership team and was heavily involved in all aspects of the case.

“I was the face of the firm for a lot of our most substantive work, including virtually all of the briefing and the settlement drafting,” he said. “VW was in some ways a turning point for me and for my career.” Volkswagen “Clean Diesel” Multidistrict Litigation, 3:15-md-02672 (N.D. Cal., filed 12/18/15).

He is proud of his and his firm’s work in that case, but also of how the U.S. judicial system dealt with the international scandal. “It showed the world what class actions can do to tackle a really big problem quickly,” he said, particularly how litigants, regulators and environmental agencies all worked together to craft the $14 billion settlement.

Currently, Budner is running Lief Cabraser’s day-to-day operations as it presses San Francisco’s lawsuit against opioid makers, distributors and sellers. His work includes guiding discovery, writing briefs, arguing close to a motion per month and fending off 10 motions to dismiss.

The city’s lawsuit initially was gathered into the multidistrict litigation pending before a federal judge in Cleveland. However, the judge remanded it and a few others to their originating courts as bellwether-like cases, Budner said. The suit is now set for trial in April 2022. City and County of San Francisco v. Purdue Pharma LP, 3:18-cv-07591 (N.D. Cal., filed Dec. 18, 2018).

Budner said the opioids litigation overall has been described as the biggest piece of civil litigation in American history. “It’s not any one person’s baby,” he said, noting that he is honored to be working with the city attorney’s office.

Lief Cabraser began putting Budner on high-profile matters the moment he joined it in 2013 following law school and a federal clerkship. The first case he worked on accused State Farm of secretly bankrolling a judge’s campaign to win election to the Illinois Supreme Court so as to be there in time to block a $1 billion verdict against the insurer in a consumer class action.

Among the parts of the case Budner helped with was preparing for the plaintiffs’ deposition of the judge, who by then was the state’s chief justice and who has long strongly denied the accusations. The case ended in a $250 million settlement right after the jury was selected. Hale v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co., 3:12-cv-00666 (S.D. Ill.).

— Don DeBenedictis